Major changes to be included in 7.0

A month and a half into the V7.0 rewrite, and I’m about 90% complete. There are some major changes to how a console and surfaces work. A friend of mine did a nice writeup about how SadConsole looks to a first-time user. The current pull request on GitHub shows all of the changes so far; 200+ files changed.

The major change is that the whole concept of changable backing surfaces is gone. Prior to 7.0, a console was the editor for a TextSurface property, a property represented the actual graphical text surface of a console. You could easily change the surface in/out of the console. There was also a SurfaceEditor class (which console inherited from) that could be directed at any TextSurface object, and edit it. This SurfaceEditor type was what had all of the editing methods such as SetForeground and Print.

This has been changed to where every Surface type itself (ex: layered, animated, basic) has all of the methods needed to manipulate the cells themselves directly. Surfaces are also positionable and drawable without the need a Console, if you don’t want one. Previously every surface had to be wrapped by a console or by a bunch of code. A Console now inherits from a surface base class which means a console is a surface now.

I think this will greatly simplify the getting started aspects of the engine. I’ll have more to talk about soon.